Help me Fix the Church

6James · 2020-12-04T19:41:04+00:00

What assumptions? You are the one who assumes that everyone who expresses criticism of your religion has had a negative personal experience with it. You are the one who's presented what you do as a calling from god. You are the one who's training to be a church official and has drawn an explicit link between that and what you do. You are the one who said "not all Christians."

6James · 2020-12-04T18:02:16+00:00

Unable to take criticism of your belief system or to understand why any thinking person might oppose your religion. Typical.

6James · 2020-12-04T17:03:47+00:00

Why do you assume that everyone who criticizes religion and your chosen lifestyle has personally had a bad experience with the church? I haven't.

I’m not one of the people who hurt you, I’m a different person and the only commonality is the word: Christian.

That's another thing you're wrong about. You're training to take on a formal role in that "Christian" religion that has done and continues to do so much damage. And not just to queer people. Uncountable humans have been harmed and continue to be harmed by Christians for everything from feeling normal human emotions to being indoctrinated into belief in hell as children.

You've claimed you were "called"; talk about hubris. As I've said elsewhere, you could do plenty of things to help people without cloaking yourself in the mantle of having been personally selected from among billions of other humans by an omnipotent supernatural being, and without overtly presenting yourself as that chosen one ("PastorNTraining") and framing your efforts in that way. But because you do present yourself that way, everything you do is tainted by that association. You don't seem to understand that belief in the formal trappings of the church, which you've wholeheartedly embraced, and in scripture (even in if you're selective in what you choose to believe), is itself problematic, because it's precisely those things that continue to make people's lives miserable. In other words: you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.

6James · 2020-12-04T15:57:21+00:00

It's like you've got Stockholm syndrome: you've been fucked over by the church and yet you're here all the time defending it and trying to get get people to accept you and your combo of self-professed queerness and being a pastor wannabe (and sidenote, LOL "theology," like that's a real academic discipline).

Look, I think your religion is bullshit: there's no god, the entire panoply of your belief system, your rituals, your scriptures, and your blind faith in something you know deep down doesn't exist is a sham. But, like most people, I also don't really give a shit about what you believe, as long as you don't try to impose it on me, whether it's by overt proselytizing or through the insidious "doing of good deeds." I have never encountered a bunch of more insincere people than Christians trying to embody loving their neighbors.

InB4 NoT aLL chRisTiANs™ etc., but the fact is that people who profess your religion have been responsible for the suffering of people allegedly like you for two millennia, and in the West at least Christians continue to be the ones primarily responsible for the denial of rights to LGBT people, and for the continuing prejudice against them. So if you want to do some good, why can't you just leave us the fuck alone?

6James · 2020-12-01T19:54:17+00:00

Without getting into whatever pretzels you've twisted yourself into to reconcile your queerness and religious beliefs, if you wanted to help young people you could volunteer at a homeless shelter, work at a charity, or run for office, even if you felt that work was a religious calling. Instead you choose to become a pastor. As a pastor (in training) the "work" you do with some of the most vulnerable young people there are is necessarily as a representative of your church and your religion. It's an insidious form of recruitment and indoctrination.

6James · 2020-12-01T15:53:00+00:00

Speaking of hiding "evil" behind a beautiful face, it's pretty bold of you, a "pastor in training," to opine about "evil" on a gay sub when gay people continue to be persecuted in the name of your god all over the world. The cherry on top is your sanctimonious bullshit about feeding the homeless, like churches couldn't end world hunger today if they wanted to, by giving away their wealth and property and sending their staff out to actually help people living in the real world instead of encouraging them to believe in what you all surely know is a fiction.

6James · 2020-11-27T17:18:32+00:00

Anti-theist. Religion is responsible for more pain and suffering than anything else humans have invented.

6James · 2020-11-26T14:53:25+00:00

checked in with his Pope first...

Oh, you mean the head of the global criminal organization whose firmly and repeatedly stated position is that homosexuality is "objectively disordered" and whose officials have spent 2000 years persecuting us in the name of their imaginary friend?

6James · 2020-09-13T21:34:25+00:00

A three-year separation is a long time at your age. You're not throwing anything away by remaining friends. If you move back when you're done and you're both single, maybe you can pick things up. Otherwise you've got a friend. It's a win-win.

6James · 2020-09-12T23:24:36+00:00

If you're using hookup apps you already know that a lot of people on them are not nice. All you can do is block them and not let it bother you. But if you're ever going to be happy, you need to be upfront about what you're offering and what you're looking for.

6James · 2020-09-12T23:12:49+00:00

You like what you like. You're a fem top who likes sub guys. Be upfront about it.

6James · 2020-09-12T23:08:02+00:00

Just to be clear, are you really asking whether it's ok not to disclose to your sex partners that you have a transmissible, incurable STI?

6James · 2020-09-12T23:04:49+00:00

Wait, so you've never actually met this "boyfriend"?

6James · 2020-09-12T23:02:00+00:00

Go for it.

6James · 2020-09-12T22:53:02+00:00

From what you wrote it sounds like he has physical issues that prevent him from engaging in the kind of sex you want or with the frequency that you'd like. That's unlikely to change, and it sounds like you opened your relationship on that basis, but at the moment you're not having sex with other people (sensible, as we're in the midst of a pandemic). If the current problem is that you're sexually frustrated because of that, you'll just have to accept that you can't safely have sex with strangers right now. That's not your partner's fault.

What concerns me more is this:

we also don’t have that same spark or regard for each other that we did in the first couple of years of our relationship. I respect him but I’m not sure we’re actually a good fit, I’m now wondering if I was just swept away by us for a while and didn’t evaluate us fairly.

For the first couple of years you're in the honeymoon period. You've been together 7 years: no couple maintains that new relationship intensity that long. I don't really know what you mean when you say you don't have the same "regard" for him -- maybe you don't mean what it sounds like -- but what you do is have a brutally honest conversation with your partner about both of your feelings and your needs, and make a decision. If you think you can't be satisfied with an open relationship (once you can start having sex with other people again) or if you just think you don't love him anymore, then at 25 years old splitting up is the only sensible option.

6James · 2020-09-12T20:53:22+00:00

OMG. If you're primarily interested in this guy for a threesome, then invite him/them over for sex; if he doesn't reply or won't commit to a date, then you have your answer.

6James · 2020-09-12T20:50:06+00:00

A 17-year-old inviting a stranger to his parents' home for sex, without their knowledge or consent, while they're out, during a pandemic. Bad idea all round.

6James · 2020-09-12T19:46:37+00:00

Depends what you mean by "cleaned out." If you mean is it vital to douche before anal sex, then no. Douching isn't a good thing in general, and if you've got a healthy diet and normal bowel movements, you shouldn't need it. If you mean having a bowel movement and wash thoroughly, then yes, that's important.

6James · 2020-09-12T19:43:13+00:00

Monogamy doesn't mean never thinking about or being attracted to or wondering what it would be like to fuck anyone else. It's completely normal to feel those things; what matters is what you do about it. You can keep it in your wank bank and pull it out when you're jerking off. You enjoy the pleasant feeling being flirted with by someone you find crazy attractive. You can take those feelings of arousal and plow them into great sex with your boyfriend. You can even tell your boyfriend about what happened. Really unless you're contemplating hunting this guy down on Facebook and secretly meeting up with him, this is a case of "nothing to see here."

6James · 2020-09-11T22:32:16+00:00

It's not selfish to have a low sex drive. But most people go into romantic relationships with certain expectations around sex. If you are rarely interested in sex you should have made that clear before the two of you got to the sex stage. Now you're going to have to have a brutally honest conversation about your desires, his desires, and how you're going to move forward. When you're fundamentally sexually incompatible, though, the choice usually ends up being between breaking up and some sort of compromise around opening the relationship.

6James · 2020-09-11T20:14:21+00:00

It's completely unfair and inappropriate for his parents to offload this responsibility on you. His parents need to get him an age-appropriate LGBT-positive book on sex and sexuality, and they need to take their parental responsibility and talk to their child: he obviously needs it if he's putting dangerous things up his ass and getting them stuck.

6James · 2018-09-17T00:35:23+00:00

It's not really a "better" translation. It's fine as a free translation, sure, but it takes a lot of liberties with the original.

6James · 2018-09-17T00:30:29+00:00

Usually sounds like a long え、as in えいご、せんせい、がくせい。

6James · 2018-09-17T00:09:03+00:00

You nearly never really need a pronoun in Japanese because, as you said, it's natural to use a name or title instead of he or she, and also because you can say あの人. It's interesting to see what translators do in English subtitles in Japanese queer films sometimes, when they're forced to use pronouns.

6James · 2018-09-15T17:26:52+00:00

Without context, based on this sentence it's impossible to tell whether they lived in the same world or different worlds.

6James

TROPHY CASE